Evasive Maneuvers
by VeroniqueClaire
Summary: She kissed him once to buy herself time to pick his pocket, and once to buy herself another nine and a half seconds of knowing him. It's a long way from Gotham to Florence; longer still if you go the opposite way around the globe. Selina/Bruce.
1. Chapter 1

She doesn't cry.

Not as a rule, and not that day. And she doesn't cry half a day later - when the adrenaline drops, and she's ridden the massive motorbike far enough to be running on empty, and far enough to finally feel safe to stop and check the news, as if there were news worth checking.

She is still dressed for a fight, a fight to the death that suddenly seems surreal among the bland and unaffected, the citizens living several states beyond the potential blast radius - and she can feel dumbfounded gazes on her, as she stands in her skintights in a Flying-effing-J truck stop, tearing through the newspapers to see if any of them had something besides a front-page obituary for a sacrificial hero. There would be some late-breaking update, some _something_, surely - but there is nothing, and she turns to the first ogling schmuck on her left, and asks sweetly to borrow his smartphone, grabbing it from him maybe just a moment before he stammers a "yes".

There is no news online of a survival. She hurls the phone back at the bewildered mouth-breather and storms down the aisle of the minimart, her boots denting half-moons into the linoleum, terrible fluorescent lighting making her eyes squint.

Selina Kyle buys a sweatshirt. And a styrofoam cup of bad coffee, and three energy bars, and a full tank of gas. As if she ever needed anything more than enough to keep going and the means to escape.

* * *

She drives on and off for hours, days.

In an all-night diner in the Rust Belt, she sits alone in a six-person booth, and thinks over and over again that she is fond of being _alive_, and her decisions have done well by that objective. Even in this half abandoned ruin of a metropolis, she's sitting with her back to a wall. If the main entrance is blocked, her exits are to the right, through the swinging door and out through the kitchen, or to the left - straight through the plate-glass, if it comes down to it. Boom.

It ought to sound like fun.

Her fork clanks as she stabs angrily at a plate of awful hashbrowns, and she tells herself that she has always had to hold her own, so nothing is different now. She has lost nothing, and no one. The thought that she could have trusted a billionaire with a hero complex to share the load of self-preservation - the idea that someone could have actually had her back and she could have looked out for his - it seems like something so naive and far away that she must have believed it as a kid, and not just three days ago. The idea of someone that she could trust, of someone existing who was competent enough to lean on, is a kind of relief she cannot even imagine.

Half an hour later she is walking down empty streets toward the deserted parking garage where she'd stashed the bike; a few levels of parking installed opportunistically into the gutted core of some old 13-story building - years ago, probably, before the garage itself was abandoned too. No jobs downtown for people to drive to everyday, anymore. This part of the country is almost more grim than the besieged Gotham was; broken windows on empty skyscrapers like black eyes on old dreams. Neighbors burn condemned buildings to the ground here, rather than let squatters take up residence. It feels hollow and defeated. She doesn't feel out of place.

She climbs nine flights of stairs in the garage, and traces her path across the cavernous parking level with a small flashlight, until she sees the monster of a bike, still there in the corner. A red glint of light flashes off the wall and instinct takes over as she swiftly dives to one side, rolling and waiting for the gunfire to begin, calculating the quickest path to a weapon - but the silence pounds in her ears and after a few minutes it's clear she's alone. Slowly, she raises the flashlight, and the red shine returns.

It's some decorative bit of glass embedded in the wall; it is not the laser sight on a sniper rifle. She can't remember the last time she was spooked without perfectly good reason.

The bike has headlights that she's been warned were a couple thousand lumens too bright for city streets. She flips them on full strength for the first time, flooding the empty parking garage with light - and she realizes from the arched ceiling and the ravaged gilding on the walls that the building they'd eviscerated to make this garage had once been a theater.

It feels like a desecrated cathedral. It feels like a place to mourn the dead.

The concrete floor touches the walls on all sides but one, and she walks to the edge of the open side, looking down into a shadowy level two stories below, of shattered tiles and staircases that must have once been the lobby. There's no railing and she stands with her toes on the edge, forcing herself to balance. Balance requires control, and she's always been able to command herself to unfeel anything on demand.

She kissed him once to buy herself time to pick his pocket, and once to buy herself another nine and a half seconds of knowing him.

A shiver runs through her and abruptly she pushes it all down. She does not think about his lost life. She cannot think about how he was a person and now he's _gone_, and where his breath and thoughts went. Sadness is weakness. She got out of Gotham, and she's ok, because she has to be ok. Breakdowns are a luxury for people with shoulders to cry on.

* * *

The weaponized bike gets too much attention on the interstates, and she trades it in at a criminally low price to a wide-eyed used car dealer in exchange for a cheap Kawasaki. She returns to the road with significantly less horsepower and a much more comfortable anonymity.

In a midwestern suburb she hunts down an internet cafe that has clearly seen better days - but the dingy beige PC is new enough, just barely, to have the USB port to import the clean slate software. She watches as the progress bar shows database after database being wiped free of her sins, her identity being returned to that of a law-abiding newborn, and even though it's probably bullshit, probably just an animation on the screen instead of actual change, actual salvation... she lets the program finish, even if she doesn't let herself believe. And then she keeps moving.

A day later and she's in the desert; dry air and a landscape like the surface of the moon, and it feels like something harsh she deserves, or maybe something so harsh that it deserves her.

The road beyond the motorcycle's windshield is flat and open; she accelerates into the the dusty red eternity stretching out toward the horizon, hot air wavering up from the asphalt, wind whipping past her ears… and when the siren begins to blare behind her, it seems like the inevitable caught up at last. It feels almost like relief, and she is strangely calm as she decides for some reason to slow down and pull over. She takes a few deep breaths as the cop walks up to the motorbike, ready for him to be responding to an all points bulletin for a known thief crossing state lines... but he just asks for her license and registration.

And in a desert in the middle of nowhere, Selina Kyle is let off the hook for a speeding ticket, on account of it being her first and only offense. "Slow down and drive safe now, ok miss?" the cop says kindly.

For the next couple of miles, she can barely drive a straight line.

* * *

Something unfurls in her, a sense of a lifetime of dead ends suddenly unblocked, and it's overwhelming; she has no destination but every mile she travels feels like a tangible distance between herself and who's she's been. She makes it as far west as the ocean, and then she switches to air travel and the cities start to go quickly, after that. Sydney. Osaka. Seoul. Each time she tries to feel liberated but instead she is restless, unsatisfied, outright unhappy - but surely this is a feeling that can simply be outrun. She's in Cape Town when the letter is slipped under her door.

White envelope. White paper. Laser printer.

"S -

You said you were adaptable.

Meet me in Florence?

- B"

…She does not cry. And as a rule, she also doesn't walk into _fucking_ _traps_.

And so she goes instead to Cartagena, where she holes up in a high rise hotel with triple deadbolts on the steel door, and drinks the minibar dry while weighing her options. Sitting on the floor of the hotel room at 4am, her back to the wall once again, chest aching worse than any ribs she's ever broken, she presses her head into her hands and fights the urge to hope.

She kissed him once to show him she was wicked, and once to show him she wished that she wasn't.

The most dangerous option is that the letter is real. None of the other options are even interesting.

Two days later Selina gets on a plane for the continent, and upon clearing customs at Fiumicino and making her way to the Termini station in Rome, the sense of dread that has been vaguely thrumming in the back of her mind comes surging to the forefront, full-blown, every bit of electricity in her brain crackling around a single word: _run_.

The letters on the station's split-flap board rattle as they flip from one row to the next, and amid the clatter of the rows of destinations changing, she strides straight past the north-bound train to Florence, boarding a south-eastern train instead.

Her better judgement seems to have kicked in, because she doesn't know what the hell she's doing in Italy at all; the letter is obviously a trap, and the handsome fool is dead, and even putting her heel to the throat of some bastard who's invoking his memory won't be particularly satisfying. She rests her head against the window of the train, curls her feet up atop her bag in the next seat, and tries to hold her shoulders hard and strong, not letting them shake.

* * *

Naples is the end of the line, as far south as this particular train can go without plunging into the sea, and when the engine finally pulls into the station, she is once again angry instead of lost. She finds a passable hotel, books a single night and then paces, unable to sleep, understanding for the first time the desire to trash a hotel room.

Jetlag. Good sense lag. What she needs is to punch holes in the wall. What she needs is to get out of here.

Sometime around 5am, she finally gives in and gets the hell out of the room, dropping out the window to the ground ten feet below, and storming up the Corso Umberto, kicking every piece of garbage that lies in her path. The road bends, and turns steeply up the hill, and she keeps walking, undaunted, and the burn as she draws air into her lungs is the first relief she's had in days. The city is dead in the early hour, few cars on the road and no other people in sight, and at each intersection she chooses the street that leads further uphill, until eventually she's standing in front of what a sign proclaims to be the Castel Sant'Elmo, some ancient fortress turned heritage building. It doesn't open for another four hours.

The gate takes her maybe thirty seconds to scale.

Inside, she finds the stairs and keeps going up at every chance, needing an edge, and eventually she's on the top level, overlooking the city from a perch on the parapet, and she tries again to find her balance, tries to breathe, tries to unfeel, and utterly fails.

She stands on the 40-foot wall of the rampart looking over the roofs of old buildings and the sea beyond and the view gets gradually blurry. It feels like a tidal wave of her own emotions is washing over her, and that she is accepting the truth at last: that letter cannot possibly be real, that he is dead, that she _lost_ him, that there was something to lose, and that she is sick with fucking grief and flailing at every turn. She closes her eyes, and takes a long, ragged breath.

"I said to meet me in _Florence_," comes a male voice from behind her that almost sounds amused.

* * *

* * *

**This is a new fandom for me, but that last line popped in my head and I built the story around it, because after seeing TDKR I was captivated by Selina's character and I couldn't shake the impression that there was no way this girl would just go hearts and flowers and swooning off to Florence - at least, not without a bit of a fight, first. :-)**

**Of course - that garage in the shell of the theater is real, and still in use. Google "Detroit theater parking garage," or see:**

******(http) tinyurl*com/detroittheaterparkinggarage**

**(http) tinyurl*com/michigantheaterparkinggarage **

**Stay tuned for the next chapter, and for readers of my POTO story Volée, don't worry; Evasive Maneuvers is a two-parter and then I'll get back to working on Chapter 7 for the other couple I've got working out their issues while running ragged around the globe. (They do say write what you know.)**

**Feedback is very, very, welcome, especially as Selina and Bruce are new to me and I'm just working out how they think. I like these characters; this particular story will be all grit and grief, but I'm already wondering how they'd do in another story with a bit more glam... **

**~Ver**


	2. Chapter 2

Gutpunched doesn't begin to describe it.

She twists around on one heel so quickly, so shocked, that she rocks back, half a degree too far - too stunned for her normal agility - and she is off-balance as the world is pulled out from under her, wincing and slipping backwards and trying desperately to think of a flip or a landing angle for breaking her fall.

A hand - it must be the man's - collides with her forearm and grabs on - and for an instant, her eyes are squinted tight and everything hangs in the balance.

The moment stretches out, as small details enter her awareness; the low rumbling noises of the city, the dawn-hour spring breeze, cool and soft across her face, and the fact that she is precariously leaning backward over a forty foot drop, with someone pulling her just barely in balance. Selina grabs his arm back with both of her own, and opens her eyes.

She almost lets go again.

But instead she wills every muscle in her body to drag herself upward, and as he helps, she pulls just hard enough to vault herself back upright and off the parapet, to land safely on the brick walkway circling the roof. She crouches for a moment and exhales, and finally looks at him - because of course, it's him.

He's dressed like a normal ex-billionaire; decidedly sharp but non-tactical street clothes, and his unmasked eyes are right there for her to try and fail to read. Slowly, he cracks a tentative smile.

Some savage emotion claws its way across her. She stands and crosses her arms, so he won't see them shaking, and her voice is low, as she accuses, "_You _said there was no autopilot."

"Are you ok?" Bruce moves toward toward her with a hand near her shoulder and she jerks away from his touch, instincts and desires utterly confused. She is incredulous, she is armorless - then she is unholy fury, and it almost feels like strength.

She locks her knees so they'll stop wavering and finally says, "What the fuck is this?"

He takes a step back, hands up where she can see them, and he says hesitantly, his eyes seeking hers, "...I was actually hoping you'd be happy to see me."

"The world thinks you're dead, " she spits back at him, as though it's the world she's concerned with.

"I know," and here he has the decency to look sheepish, "I wanted to add you to the short list that knows better." Somehow he is looking at her like she's the ghost, like it is _her _presence there that is the miracle.

Her throat is dry and her back is up against an open freefall.

She wants to grab him by the shoulders and feel for herself that he's alive. She wants to punch him for letting her worry, and then maybe punch herself for the same thing. And god dammit, there's a masochistic part of her that just wants to kiss him and lie to herself - to have a long nice minute or two of warm lips and strong arms, and pretending to believe in romance and redemption and the fairy tale of someone like him belonging with someone like her.

Those thoughts feel like a form of slipping far more dangerous than her little tango with gravity five minutes ago, and her remaining self-preservation instincts are signaling that she should bolt before she discovers she has a heart to break - but somehow she finds herself reaching for fight, instead of flight.

"Why?" She throws at him, narrowing her eyes, "Taking out loose ends now that Gotham's safe?"

"Hey - _hey_," he tilts his head incredulously, "I'm not here to _off _you. I think your world has been even darker than mine has... but we're square, you and I. Selina, I..." He swallows, and shakes his head. "I certainly don't mean you any harm." He says the final word with an awkward emphasis that is almost self-deprecating, almost self-conscious - and she freezes.

Affection. That's the emotion in the eyes that are currently trained on hers, round-edged and imploring some answer from her to an unasked question. She feels a little disoriented, and hears herself say, "Then why the note? What do you want from me?"

"You asked me to come with you; you said I could have gone anywhere, and now I can. I took your offer at face value..." He smiles again, his confidence seeming to grow, approaching cockines as he says with a grin, "...I'm sorry I'm late."

Burn it down.

No chance on earth this ends well. It's a trick after all, but it's one he's playing on himself - smitten Brahman goes slumming with a bad girl; give it a week before he comes to his senses and vanishes. Safer to cut it off, cauterize, survive.

The thoughts hit her like a kick to the breastbone, each one twinging her chest with pain, and she feels her shoulders arching up - but she wills them to stay down, wills her body to be confident. She breathes in, and shakily forces out a sugared sneer. "Aw, handsome, did you hear 'happily ever after'? I said you could skip town, same as I was. Didn't mean as a duo."

His eyes cloud with hurt, and it's surprisingly unsatisfying. The surge of panic drowns her this time, and in a snap decision, she quickly follows up, "If that's settled, I'll be heading out. Have a nice time being undead."

She gets maybe ten steps down the nearest ancient stone staircase, before she hears him call out nonchalantly, "I just spent four weeks in a hospital bed thinking about you. Would you like to get a drink sometime?"

She whirls around, fury and indignation surging through her veins, "This is a joke. If you want anything to do with me, it's only because you've got a hard-on for saving people, and I've got a bankrupt soul and a nice ass."

"Those are hard words," he says, with a calm skepticism that is absolutely maddening.

"I'm a hard woman."

"No," he says, strolling down the stairs after her and shaking his head. "You're not. You're tough, and you've been through hell."

"'Tough' is a nice way of saying 'corrupt.'" She furrows her eyebrows, tries not to wince as she notices he is walking with a slight limp, "When are you going to get it? I'm not like you, and no amount of guilt tripping is going to magically turn me into a decent human being."

"Selina, people who are truly evil don't think they're doing a damn thing wrong." He reaches the bottom of the stairs and stands facing her, casually confrontational. "You're a good person who made mistakes, and you think that just because didn't pay the price with your life, that you have to spend the rest of your life paying penance by hating yourself."

She rolls her eyes, unable to stop them from blinking so much, trying to get some semblance of control and finding her own voice saying the cruelest things she can imagine. "I don't hate myself half as much as I hate amateur psychologists. You're wrong on all counts. I only look out for number one, and I've never given a damn about you."

"You came back to save my life," he says, and for a moment it seems like he's telling himself instead of her. "You kissed me."

A long beat passes, while she tries to look unyielding, and untempted by the idea of doing it again. His face is just inches from hers now, and there - flesh and blood and breathing - is the body of the man she thought was lost to life itself, let alone lost to her, and now she could just -

"Bullshit." She quickly breaks eye contact, moves to keep walking down the corridor on this level, and he keeps following her. The first rays of dawn are starting to creep in through the arches of the loggia, and she looks out across the bay at the dormant Mount Vesuvius and not back at him as she says, her voice thick, "The world was ending and you let a pretty girl plant one on you. That means nothing."

"You're wrong" he says gravely, "if that's all you think of yourself, and you're wrong if that's all you think it meant to me."

There are so many alerts and warning signals sounding off in her head right now that she can't even single out what she's thinking or what she's afraid of, and so she grabs the nearest thought and throws it over her shoulder like a weapon. "I don't think that _anything _means anything to a flippant playboy."

Bruce stops in his tracks. "Look, I tracked you across a couple of continents; I can't really play it cool here. That kiss made me decide to turn on the autopilot, when I had been hellbent on death two minutes before… did it really mean nothing to you?" He asks flatly, frankly.

"I couldn't _let_ it mean anything more," she finally says, whirling around, choking on the word, fire in her throat, wiping her eyes, control unratcheting all over the place. "I've never thought that you meant any of it. You keep saying there's more to me, but I can't imagine any kind of more that could ever make up for leading you through the sewers to die. I blast the midtown tunnel open, I shoot the monster that's attacking you - and I still know every goddamn day that it was _pennies_ on a million dollar debt. Your software might have cleared my name to the world, but I can't ever clear it to myself." She palms her eyes, angrily, shoving water off her face, voice ragged and raw, "I have done terrible things, and if you want me close to you now, you are a _fool_, and I don't have time for fools."

He nods, slowly, seeming to take it all in, then walks a few steps to lean against the pillar closest to her, and leisurely challenge her again. "What do you have time for? Your name is clear, your remaining profits from your previous career are yours to spend - and instead you spend a week preparing to leave every city you land in. From where I stand, it looks like you have nothing but time."

"Where have you been standing, exactly? Maybe I look nicer from the lovesick-stalker shadows." She glares at him, but the words she means to be seething just sound hollow and brittle.

"I'm not a fool," he says calmly, "And I don't love you. At least, I don't yet - I don't _know _you. But I can't shake the feeling that I want to. I thought there was nothing left for me in this life, but after meeting you for the first time, I wanted to go back out into the world. I don't know what that is. But I'd like to find out."

His words may oscillate between glib and guileless, but his eyes are going to be the death of her.

It's earnest and unashamed, his look - and so genuine that she almost feels the need to flinch away from seeing someone so momentarily unguarded. Doesn't he know you're not supposed to let people see you feel anything that unreservedly? The man with the armored aircraft and the Kevlar suit suddenly has no shields up, and it is unsettling her completely.

He seems to gather himself, during her silence.

"Are you out of worst case scenarios yet?" He asks with a wry smile.

"Tactical threat assessment has kept me alive this long," she says grimly, distracted, her head swimming.

"I don't doubt it," he says with something approaching sympathy, "but it's a lot less necessary now. There aren't consequences to haunt you or traps and double-crosses in every deal, anymore. Doing just what you have to do for survival is a thing of the past. Your life is yours, your name is free. What do you _want _to do, Selina?"

She can hear birds now, and diesel engines on the streets below, and the distant blast of ship horns from the harbor. Pale sunlight is beginning to fall across the red tiled roofs of the buildings stretching out to the east; the air is a little warmer. Her heart is suddenly hammering in her chest, and she decides to jump off a cliff.

He inhales sharply as she kisses him, and she can't pull him close enough, closing her eyes and pouring two months of sublimated heartache into a singular longing for _him_. It is beyond reason, beyond knowing better, beyond self preservation and for a terrible second he tenses and she worries she's made a terrible mistake - then he is kissing her back in earnest, his very real breath filling her own lungs.

She kissed him once because he was a mark, and once because he was a hero. She kisses him now because he is a man she wants to kiss.

And he wants to kiss her - his arms like steel rebar wrapped around her, crushing her against his chest as his lips press back against hers with with an urgency and intensity that momentarily fills her head with a rush like waves crackling across her brain, dark and dizzy and consumed entirely. Her pulse seems to be coming not from her heart but her entire chest and this is dangerous, this is losing control, this is how drowning begins - and there are a thousand reasons why any man on earth would be safer for her to kiss than this one.

His arms slowly relax around her, and one of his hands traces tenderly across her shoulder blade and down the back of her arm. She stops to take a breath and he presses his forehead to hers, his eyes still closed, his hand stroking past her elbow in a caress that turns sharp as his fingers deftly lock like a cuff around her wrist.

"Please don't run," he says in a low breath without opening his eyes - and it is a statement, an order, but it is also a plea.

She twitches against his grip instinctively, but his hand is like steel locked around hers, and he murmurs again, "_Please_."

He opens his eyes and looks into hers.

* * *

**Author's Note: Thank you all so much for your reviews and messages! It turns out I was entirely wrong when I said this was going to only be a two-parter - there will be three chapters for certain, and possibly a fourth. It turns out I'm having too much fun with these characters to stop now. :-) **

**It also turns out that there's a lot more than two chapters of walls coming down and catharsis required, before these two could be cheerfully having a nice dinner on the banks of the Arno. I'll be very interested to hear your impressions and opinions on my characterizations here; in the film I think both of them project extraordinary outward confidence, but I think it's often a compensation for vulnerability, especially on Selina's part - so I wanted to show them both really feeling and even hurting, behind all that quipping.**

Your reviews are a wonderful thing, and are a large part of my motivation to keep writing - so thank you in advance for any feedback.

~Ver


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